Sunday, December 30, 2012

In today’s LA Times travel section there’s a piece titled “Reimagined:
After upheaval era, Moscow and St. Petersburg tap culinary traditions – with a
twist,” and yes that’s some pretty sad writing right there, but we know that journalists
seldom write headlines for their own pieces.

No, the real sadness comes when the author, Sasha Vasilyuk, visits a
traditional Russian restaurant in St.
Petersburg, named Russkaya Charka.
Vasilyuk writes, “I looked at the menu: bear cutlets, elk stew, veal
tongue. These guys were serious about
their fare. So I ordered a Pozharsky
cutlet, a tender chicken fillet coated with white bread chunks.’”

There's bear and elk on the menu and you order the frigging chicken!!! That is very, very sad. Some people
don’t know how to enjoy themselves.
Others know how, they just prefer not to.

Friday, December 28, 2012

As the year ends, people, or at least food writers, are inclined to
take stock and declare what were the best things they ate or drank over the
last twelve months.I always find this
surprisingly hard.I can never quite
remember whether I ate certain things six or twelve or eighteen months
ago.

Fortunately, in the age of the digital camera, images
are encoded with the date they were taken, and looking through my iPhoto
library I’ve come across various images of some of the food and drink, and
other gourmet-related items that I thought were worth photographing this
year. Of course, taking a photograph is
no indication that the food was especially good - the better the restaurant,
the less inclined I am to make an idiot of myself by taking snaps.

The above muffin, for instance, eaten in the British
Museum in London, looked bizarrely picturesque but didn’t taste especially
interesting.

So, pressing on modestly, here are a couple of
contrasting cups of coffee. The very
fancily-presented one above, is from Urth Caffe, in downtown Los Angeles:
anything looks more organic when it’s got an image of a leaf on top. The one below is an anything but fancy cup of
joe from Lori’s Diner in San Francisco.

But again, anything tastes better when you’re sitting
in a booth with red sparkly upholstery. And
in fact quite a few of the meals I remember best from this year were eaten in
diners. The one below shows breakfast at
Sherman’s Deli in Palm Springs – nothing like half a pound of egg salad and
half a pound of chopped liver to start the day.

And then, at the Mad Greek Café in Primm Nevada,
below, I had this feta and spinach omelet – the highlight actually was the
bread, the sourest sourdough bread I’ve ever tasted. The potatoes were pretty great too.

The Mad Greek also provided the Loved with an
opportunity for some low level lewdness.

And here was probably the most surprising thing I ate
this year – Thai style cockles.

As a Yorkshireman I’m used to having my cockles boiled
and then saturated in vinegar. These,
which came in a can, seasoned with chili, soy, salt
and sugar, were really great once I’d put aside all my expectations about how a
cockle should taste. Apparently it’s called
"hoi klang" in Thailand

Somewhere along the line I had the above chocolates
with images of cocktails printed on them, but I have no memory of what they
tasted like and if I hadn’t taken the picture I might have forgotten about them
all together; they sure look great though. I hope they tasted the same way.

And this was also the year that I became mildly
addicted to the Blood and Sand cocktail served at the Dresden restaurant in Los
Feliz, you know the place that features in the movie Swingers.

The Dresden
seems to keep its Blood and Sand recipe pretty close to the chest. My understanding is that it’s usually a
whisky drink but the Dresden waiter I spoke to seemed to think it was made with
rum. Either way it’s a fine concoction,
and really a perfectly unisex concoction, certainly colorful and fancy but by
no means a girly drink.

And finally a small celebration of a dying form, the
great, overelaborate American restaurant sign.Again, I realize there may be no correlation between the mightiness of
the sign and the quality of the food.The wonderful example below is from Nicely’s in Lee Vining, Ca, where I
had a perfectly decent roast turkey dinner, but it wasn’t as spectacular as the
sign.How could it be?

And in Ventura I came across the sign below for the
Hong Kong Inn, and I confess I didn’t make it inside – it was the promise of
the “Polynesian Review” that deterred me, but it’s definitely on my list of places
to go back to one of these days.I’ve
got to have something to look forward to in 2013, right?

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

The artist Richard Prince (that’s him
above, the one who isn’t topless) once bought me a sandwich, for which I was,
and remain, very grateful. It was in the
local diner in Rensselaerville, upstate New York, where he had a home at the
time, and I think still does. I had a grilled cheese sandwich and I can safely
say it was the greasiest grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever eaten, not that I
intend that as a criticism.

Maybe what I needed was a fizzy lemon
drink to wash it down and cut through the fat.
Maybe, belatedly, Richard Prince has had the same idea. At this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach he’s
launching a drink called, Lemon Fizz, making it in collaboration with the
AriZona tea people. They say it’s “a
slightly carbonated beverage that contains natural lemon flavor and is
sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and sucralose." OK, so that sugary glop might not have cut
through the grease so well after all.
And it would surely be improved by a giant slug of liquor.

The can, above, looks particularly fine,
showing young Prince in the days when his hair was bleached a post-punk white. Strangely enough he seems to have about as
much hair now as he did back then. The pic below is by Terry Richardson.

As with all things Prince, I’m
never sure that his accounts of his own past are really to be believed, or
whether it’s all some sort of art prank, but if you go to a piece of his prose
titled “Tell Me Everything” you’ll read that his mother, a former spy, had a
second career as one of those women who hands out food samples in supermarkets.

Prince writes, “My mother ended up
working … as a food demonstrator. She would dress up like June Cleaver and
stand behind a little folding table and try to hand you a piece of beef jerky.
She always kept kool-aid in small paper cups ... ‘doctor's’ cups ... just in
case you didn't like the taste and flavors of what she was trying to
demonstrate. She said the ‘refreshment’ was her contribution, her ‘brain child’
to the job.”

As an Englishman, the deeper
semiotics of Kool-Aid have always rather passed me by.If it was available in England when I was
going up it certainly never made it into our house.I associate it far more with the Grateful
Dead and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test than with any childhood beverage. Above is the rather sober edition that I first read; modern editions look much more "psychedelic." We do know that American spies were big fans of acid, and I also know that Richard Prince has a fine collection of acid-related books.Coincidence?You be the judge.

You can see more of the Richard
Prince’s deeply wonderful book collection here: